The present invention relates to an image control apparatus, image control method and program.
In recent years, there are known image control apparatuses, which control images after preserving plural image data in electronic albums.
With reference to this image control apparatus, when thousands frames of film images preserved at home are added to an electronic album, for example, a large number of films or albums with printed images are scanned first with a film scanner or a print scanner to be digitized, and the digitized image data are stored in electronic albums.
Now, there has been proposed a technology wherein, when image data are added to image database, if an image, which is similar to or the same as an image to be newly stored, has already been stored in the image database, the storage of the image data (double registration) is prevented. (For example, Refer to Patent Document 1.)
[Patent Document 1] TOKKAI No. 2001-319231
However, according to the Patent Document 1 mentioned above, when an image to be stored anew is similar to, but is different from the image already stored, there is a possibility of deletion of the image by mistake instead of being stored in the image database.
Besides, for example, in the case where there are a large number of image data stored in the image database, and if plural image data related to similar image or nearly identical image are randomly stored, there happens a problem that it becomes impossible to use conveniently the image desired by the user in the image database.